TerrA-P: testing remote monitoring of productivity during droughts

The year 2018 saw a widespread and intense drought across much of Europe. It was caused by a combination of high-pressure systems over the continent, which led to a lack of rainfall and unusually high temperatures. The drought had a significant impact of agriculture and livestock farming with further pressures from wildfires that were fuelled …

REALM (Reinventing Ecosystem And Land-surface Models). 2021

With a collective sigh of relief, we said goodbye to 2020 and with slightly subdued optimism, kicked off 2021 with a team meeting. On Microsoft Teams, of course! The REALM team are geographically dispersed over the UK and Ireland but now thanks to lockdowns, members of our team and now also living in India, China …

Stomata and soil water stress

By Dr Alienor Lavergne Stomata, the tiny pores on the surface of leaves, play a huge role not just in plant development but also in regulating gas exchanges between the terrestrial biosphere and the atmosphere. They control both the amount of CO2 a plant takes up from the atmosphere and how much water they lose …

Remembering Georgina

By Colin Prentice Dame Georgina Mace (Image: Jussi Puikkonen, Flickr. Image taken from Cambridgeconservation.org) My office at Silwood Park used to be occupied by Dame Georgina Mace FRS, who sadly died of cancer last month. What an act to follow! A number of ecosystem and biodiversity scientists, including myself, had even met (virtually) with Georgina …

Anonymous peer review: “conversation” or a one-sided shouting match? By Colin Prentice

We often read about how peer review is “essential”, the “bedrock” of scientific publication, and so on. Peer reviewers’ comments can indeed be enormously helpful. Reviewers may misunderstand what you wrote – meaning that you had better rewrite it, or else other readers will misunderstand it, too! They may also gently point out that your …

A visit to India, back when travel was still allowed…

In early March, before the world went into lockdown, Colin headed out to India to give some lectures at the Indian Institute for Science (IISC) in Bengaluru, one of the most renowned scientific centres in India.  First up was the Annual Jeremy Grantham Lecture at the Divecha Centre for Climate change (http://dccc.iisc.ac.in/about_us.html). Colin has long …

No white Christmas: Rodolfo’s adventures in Brazil

For a few weeks between December and January 2019/2020, I was in the Brazilian Semiarid (Northeastern region) to conduct research activities, which included a workshop, field visits, and meeting with partners for future collaboration planning. The workshop was on ecosystem modelling with a focus on the role of the Caatinga vegetation on regional energy and …

Using optimality hypothesis to explain plant responses to elevation – a new paper by Yunke Peng et al. published in New Phytologist

Understanding plant functions and their adaptation to environment is essential to predict plants behaviour and the resulting whole ecosystem water and carbon cycling under the future climate. Many recent studies – more than five in 2017 alone – have analysed plant trait and carbon-cycling variations along an intensively studied Peruvian Amazon-Andes elevation transect  (Fig. 1). …

“Historical changes in stomatal limitations on photosynthesis…” – a new paper by Aliénor Lavergne, Colin Prentice et al. published in New Phytologist

Plants open and close their stomata in response to changes in the environment, so they can absorb the CO2 they need to grow, while also avoid drying out. When CO2 inside a leaf starts to fall, stomata opens so that more CO2 can enter and be used for photosynthesis. When plants become dehydrated, stomata close …

A more rigorous method for palaeoclimate reconstruction. By Mengmeng Liu

Knowledge of the past climate states is important because it can help us understand present-day problems, particularly current climate changes. Although there are no direct analogues of anthropogenic climate change in the past, the climate mechanisms are the same throughout the time1–4. However, direct measurements of climate extend back only to the 17th century5 and, …